The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and Crash is one of the bigger paving stones. The movie's heart is in the right place-- Paul Haggis clearly wants to jump-start a dialogue about race relations in America-- but the execution is so awful that the only dialogue it inspired in our house was a series of groans.

Crash's problem is that it tries way, way too hard to make its point. The movie revolves around a group of ethnically diverse LA residents whose lives keep intersecting during the course of a day, allowing them to be act out little morality plays about racism. Rather than give us actual characters with fully fleshed-out personalities (which could include racism, opening the door for a discussion of the subject that actually had some depth), everyone is reduced to a set of tics that involve race-relations. It's the hard-bitten cop who doesn't like black people! The easily-enraged Iranian guy! The tough-looking Latino with a heart of gold! The Uncle Tom director! The cynical white politician! And so on! (the one character bit that I likes was that the role of Paranoid, Racist, Upper-Class White Woman was filled by Sandra Bullock, who's so easy to hate that she was a natural for the part). And it doesn't help that everyone's defining racist tic is as extreme as possible-- the hard-bitten racist cop can't just harass black motorists, he has to molest them. I'm surprised Matt Dillon didn't grow a mustache just so that he could twirl it villainously in his big Evil Cop scene.

It's not just the characterizations that work too hard; the film's plot logic is just as stretched. Since the same group of people have to keep interacting to allow everyone to display their full range of tics, all sorts of implausible coincidences crop up. The same people keep just happening to pull each other over and rescue each other from horrific car crashes. I'm a big fan of implausible coincidences in certain movies-- would the existence of two Jeff Lebowskis really confuse criminals that much?-- but it has to be the right kind of movie. Here, they undercut the reality of what is allegedly a serious, realistic look at a real-world problem.

We'll probably never be rid of racism, but a boy can dream that some day we'll be free of heavy-handed moralism in movies.